Metro Vancouver standby power
Windstorms, wet snow and falling limbs take out power across Metro Vancouver every single season. We supply and install standby generators that restore your home automatically in about 10 to 30 seconds — heat, water, refrigeration, internet and medical equipment stay running whether you are home or not.
Automatic. Permanent. Permitted.
Whole-home standby power, sized to your house.
What an outage actually costs
Power outages in the Lower Mainland are rarely brief and rarely convenient. They arrive during November windstorms, January freeze-ups and summer heat events — the exact moments when a home needs heating, cooling, refrigeration and pumping the most.
Stairs, candles, space heaters and medical equipment are all riskier during an outage. Automatic backup power means the lights, alarms, CO detectors and medical devices never stop — the transfer happens in seconds, whether anyone is home or not.
A full fridge stays safe for about four hours and a freezer for 24 to 48. A single multi-day storm outage can write off $500 to $1,500 of groceries. Backup power removes that decision entirely.
Gas furnaces and boilers still need electricity for blowers, controls and pumps. When it drops near freezing and the grid is down, you lose heat — and interior plumbing starts trending toward burst pipes.
The storms that cut power are the storms that overload drainage. If the sump pump stops during heavy rain, water finds the basement. One avoided flood usually costs more than the generator.
Remote work, online classes, security cameras, gates and smart locks all depend on power. An outage in the middle of a workday is lost income and missed commitments, not just inconvenience.
On well-water properties, losing power means losing water entirely: no drinking water, no showers, no toilets, no livestock water. Backup power keeps the property functional, not just comfortable.
The feature
A single-family home on a treed hillside street is near the end of the restoration queue.
Metro Vancouver has an unusual combination of conditions for an urban region: dense mature tree canopy, steep terrain on the North Shore and in the Tri-Cities, long overhead distribution spans, a very wet and windy autumn, and an increasingly electric housing stock. Individually none of those is unusual. Together they produce a region where multi-hour outages are routine and multi-day outages happen most winters somewhere in the Lower Mainland.
The pattern repeats every year. A Pacific frontal system arrives with gusts in the 70 to 100 km/h range. Saturated ground releases root systems, limbs break, and conifers contact primary lines. Crews are dispatched to hundreds of simultaneous faults, and priority goes to hospitals, major feeders and the largest customer counts first. A single-family home on a treed hillside street is, realistically, near the end of that queue. That is the gap a home standby generator closes.
A standby generator is a permanently installed appliance. It sits outside on a pad, much like an air conditioning condenser, and it is hard-wired to your electrical panel through an automatic transfer switch. That switch is the part most homeowners have never heard of and the part that matters most. It continuously monitors utility voltage. When the grid fails, it isolates your home from the utility, signals the generator to start, and connects your circuits to generator power — typically within 10 to 30 seconds. When utility power returns and stays stable, it transfers back and shuts the generator down after a cool-down cycle.
Because the unit is connected to a fixed fuel supply — usually natural gas — there is nothing to refuel, nothing to drag out of a shed in the rain, and no extension cords running through a door. That distinction is not just about convenience. It is also about safety: carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators operated in garages, under decks or near windows is a documented cause of serious injury during storm events, and back-feeding a portable into a wall outlet endangers utility crews. A permanently installed system with a proper transfer switch removes both hazards by design.
There are two legitimate ways to design a residential system, and the right answer depends on your loads and budget.
Generator sizing is where most bad installations are created. Square footage is a poor proxy for electrical demand. What matters is total running load plus the starting surge of the largest motors in the house. Heat pumps, air conditioners, well pumps and deep-well booster pumps can draw two to three times their running current for a fraction of a second at start-up, and a generator that cannot absorb that surge will stumble, trip or shut down under exactly the conditions you bought it for.
As a general frame of reference: a gas-heated home of roughly 2,000 square feet often lands in the 14 to 18 kW range for whole-home coverage. An all-electric home with a heat pump, electric hot water, induction cooking and an EV charger can require 22 to 26 kW, and large hillside homes with multiple zones, elevators and pumps frequently move into liquid-cooled units above 30 kW. Those figures are starting points for a conversation, not a quote. The number that belongs in your proposal comes from an actual calculation of your panel and your equipment.
Natural gas is the default recommendation almost everywhere in the region where service exists. Runtime is effectively unlimited, there is no tank to maintain, no fuel to stabilize, and nothing to manage during a storm. The gas line must be sized correctly from the meter to the unit, which is a design step, not an afterthought — an undersized line starves the engine under load.
Propane is the answer for acreages and upper-slope properties outside the gas network. It stores indefinitely and burns cleanly, but the tank has to be sized for the runtime you actually want. Planning for a two- or three-day outage rather than an eight-hour one is the difference between a system that helps and a system that runs dry at hour twenty.
Diesel is mostly a commercial and large-estate choice. It offers high power density but requires fuel storage, polishing and more involved maintenance, so it is rarely the right fit for a typical residential lot.
A compliant residential generator installation is a multi-trade project: electrical work at the panel and transfer switch, gas fitting for the fuel connection, and site work for the pad and clearances. It requires permits — typically electrical and gas, and in many municipalities a mechanical or placement permit — and it is inspected against the Canadian Electrical Code and provincial gas regulations.
Permits are not bureaucracy for its own sake. Unpermitted generator work is a recurring problem at resale, it can compromise an insurance claim after a fire or flood, and an improperly installed transfer switch can energize a utility line that a crew believes is dead. Any quote you accept should include permit costs, inspection and a commissioning load test where the generator is proven under real household load — not just started and shut off.
A standby generator is a small engine that spends almost all of its life waiting. That is a specific kind of mechanical challenge, and it is why maintenance is not optional. A weekly self-exercise cycle circulates oil and keeps components free. An annual service covers oil and filter, air filter, spark plugs on schedule, valve lash on schedule, coolant on liquid-cooled units, and a battery test.
Battery failure is by far the most common reason a generator fails to start when it is finally needed. A three- to five-year-old battery that reads fine at rest can still fail under cranking load in cold weather. Testing it annually, under load, is the single highest-value maintenance item on the list.
Framed as a comfort purchase, backup power is easy to postpone. Framed as risk management, the math looks different. A single extended outage can mean spoiled food, a flooded basement from a stopped sump pump, burst pipes from a cold snap, lost remote-work income, hotel nights, and — for households with medical equipment — a genuine safety event. Insurance deductibles and remediation costs from one water event routinely exceed the installed cost of a system.
There is also a resale consideration. In outage-prone neighbourhoods — the North Shore slopes, Burke Mountain, Silver Valley, rural Langley and Surrey — a permitted standby system is a recognised fixture that buyers specifically look for, in the same category as a newer roof or an upgraded electrical service.
If you are weighing options, the fastest way forward is a load calculation and a site review. That produces the three numbers that actually matter: the size you need, the fuel that fits your property, and the installed price. Start with a free assessment and see where your home lands.
How a project runs
We measure what you actually run, not what a brochure assumes — heat, hot water, fridges, pumps, EV charging and the starting surge of your largest motors. That determines the right kilowatt rating.
Placement for clearances, noise and setbacks; gas line sizing from the meter; transfer switch location at the panel. Electrical and gas permits are filed before work begins.
Pad prep, setting the unit, gas piping, transfer switch and panel terminations. Most residential installs are one to three days of on-site work.
Start-up, load testing under real conditions, inspection sign-off, and a walkthrough so you know exactly what happens in an outage. Annual maintenance keeps it dependable.
Electrical and gas work performed to the Canadian Electrical Code and BC gas requirements, with permits pulled and inspections completed on every project. Documentation is handed over at close-out.
Every proposal begins with a measured load calculation and a site review of panel capacity, gas supply, clearances and noise constraints — so the size and placement are right the first time.
Annual maintenance, load testing and battery replacement keep a standby system dependable for 20-plus years. A generator that has not been tested is an assumption, not a plan.
Where we work
Outage risk, fuel availability and permitting differ from one municipality to the next. Choose your community for local detail, or see the full service area list.
Steep terrain, mature trees and long overhead spans make the North Shore one of the most outage-prone parts of the region.
→Large hillside properties with deep tree cover and long driveways — where an outage takes out heat, water pumps and security all at once.
→Mixed older and new housing stock where panel capacity often decides whether a whole-home or essential-circuits system makes sense.
→Flat, low-lying and pump-dependent — where losing power can mean losing drainage before it means losing the fridge.
→Long rural feeders and large lots mean some Surrey neighbourhoods lose power more often — and for longer — than the regional average.
→Hillside subdivisions backing onto forest — beautiful, and directly in the path of every winter wind event.
→Acreages, wells and hobby farms — properties where a long outage has consequences beyond the house itself.
→Coastal wind exposure plus low-lying drainage — a combination that rewards automatic, hands-off backup power.
→Heritage homes and older services, where backup power planning often starts with the electrical panel.
→Forested edges and long rural feeders — outages here are frequent, and restoration is rarely quick.
→Most fully installed air-cooled whole-home systems for a typical Metro Vancouver house land in the $12,000–$22,000 range once you include the generator, automatic transfer switch, pad, gas line work, electrical labour, permits and commissioning. Smaller essential-circuits systems can start lower, and large liquid-cooled units for big hillside homes run higher. The three biggest cost drivers are the size of the unit, the distance from the gas meter and panel, and whether your electrical service needs upgrading.
Sizing should come from a load calculation, not a rule of thumb. We total the running load of what you want powered, then add the starting surge of the largest motors — usually a heat pump, air conditioner, well pump or sump pump. A 2,000 sq ft gas-heated home often lands around 14–18 kW. An all-electric home with a heat pump, electric hot water and an EV charger can need 22–26 kW or more. Oversizing wastes money and undersizing causes nuisance shutdowns, so the calculation matters.
Yes. A permanently installed standby system monitors utility voltage continuously. When power fails, the automatic transfer switch safely disconnects your home from the grid, the generator starts, and power is restored — typically within 10 to 30 seconds. When utility power returns and stabilizes, the switch transfers back and the generator shuts down and cools off. Nobody has to be home, and nothing has to be plugged in.
Both are valid designs. Whole-home coverage backs up the entire panel and is the most convenient option. An essential-circuits design backs up a selected subpanel — furnace or heat pump, fridge and freezer, sump pump, well pump, internet, lights and a few outlets — for less money. Modern load-management modules can also shed big loads like an EV charger or hot tub automatically, letting a smaller generator cover a whole house.
Natural gas is the better choice almost everywhere in Metro Vancouver where service exists: unlimited runtime, no tank, no refuelling and nothing to manage during a storm. Propane is the answer for acreages and upper-slope properties outside the gas network, and it stores well, but you have to size the tank for realistic multi-day runtime and keep it topped up. Diesel is used mainly for commercial and large residential applications.
Modern enclosed air-cooled units run around 60–67 dB(A) at a typical measuring distance — comparable to a central air conditioner or a normal conversation. Placement matters as much as the spec: keeping the unit away from bedroom windows, respecting municipal noise bylaws and setbacks, and using the enclosure's sound-attenuating design all keep neighbours comfortable.